Joshua Stylman Breaks Down: The Ungrateful Heir (NYC Mayoral Candidate Zohran Mamdani)

A Warning to New York City About The Openly Socialist NYC Mayoral Candidate

by Joshua Stylman

The unthinkable has happened. In last week's Democratic primary, New York City—America's financial capital and largest metropolis—chose Zohran Mamdani as its mayoral nominee. A 33-year-old socialist who promises to implement Marx's economic theories in a city of 8.3 million people now stands one election away from controlling a $100 billion budget.

I don't normally write about politics. While I understand elections have consequences, I've largely come to view them as theater. The older I get, the more it bores me—regardless of which candidate wins, people become more divided, our liberties erode, corporate power expands, and regular people lose.

But this feels different. This isn't about choosing between two flavors of the same corrupt system—this is about handing control of America's largest city to someone whose family represents a three-generation case study in how Western institutions create their own destroyers.

Up front, I have to confess: I once found myself drawn to the ideas that Zohran Mamdani is now selling to New York City voters. Like many young people, I became intrigued by Marx, socialism, and economic models that promised to solve wealth inequality. The diagnosis of capitalism's problems seemed compelling, and the solutions sounded noble in theory.

Then I started learning history.

What I discovered radically shifted my perspective. The same systems that promise to redistribute wealth have, without exception, concentrated it in the hands of those who control the state apparatus. The same ideologies that claim to liberate the working class have consistently produced the most oppressive regimes in human history. And the same politicians who promise radical change somehow always end up becoming the new ruling class.

Which brings us to Zohran Mamdani—the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor of America's largest city, a man whose family story reads like a case study in generational ingratitude, and whose political platform represents the most dangerous experiment in socialist policy that America has seen in decades.

The Three-Generation Arc: From Beneficiary to Revolutionary

To understand Mamdani, you have to examine his family's remarkable journey and how each generation has been a beneficiary of policies that enabled upward mobility—yet somehow concluded that the system needs to be torn down entirely.

Generation One: The Colonial Administrator Mamdani's maternal grandfather, Amrit Lal Nair, was a 1949-batch Indian Administrative Service officer who served as Sub-Collector and District Collector in Odisha and helped establish the Rourkela Steel Plant. His legacy endures locally with landmarks like Nair Stadium and Nair Chowk named after him. When partition came in 1947, Hindu-Muslim violence forced his family to flee Pakistan. They found refuge through the cosmopolitan nature of the British Empire, eventually settling in Uganda—though the extent of any wealth accumulated there remains undocumented in public records.

Generation Two: The CIA Scholar Mahmood Mamdani, Zohran's father, came to America in 1963 through the CIA-linked ‘Airlift Africa’ program—the same Kennedy Foundation initiative that brought Barack Obama Sr. to the United States.

As documented in Susan Williams' book ‘White Malice,’ this wasn't just an educational program but a "sheep dipping" operation designed to groom future pro-American leaders of newly independent African states.

The program worked exactly as intended—for America. Mahmood received his education at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard, eventually becoming a prominent professor at Columbia University. He was welcomed into America's most elite academic circles, gained citizenship, and built a distinguished career as a scholar.

But rather than appreciation, Mahmood developed a deep hostility toward his benefactors. He named his son "Zohran Kwame Mamdani"—the middle name honoring Kwame Nkrumah, winner of the Lenin Peace Prize, ally of Communist China, and the dictator who turned Ghana into a one-party state with a cult of personality that would have made North Korea blush.

Generation Three: The Revolutionary Zohran Mamdani represents the culmination of this family trajectory. Born in Uganda to parents who had been elevated by Western institutions—his father an academic star and his mother the acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, whose work I genuinely admire—he grew up in America as the privileged child of two affluent and famous parents. He attended elite prep schools, got his degree from Bowdoin College, and entered American politics.

And now he wants to implement Marxist economic policy in America's largest city.

The Performance Artist Politicians

But before we get to his policies, let's address the elephant in the room: Zohran Mamdani is a performer, not a revolutionary. Like most modern politicians, he's a shape-shifter who changes his message based on his audience. Watch him code-switch accents depending on who he's addressing.

Observe him eating with his hands for "authentic" photo ops while using a knife and fork for a burrito in other situations.

Listen to him declare "I don't think we should have billionaires" while his top PAC donor is a Peter Thiel-backed tech entrepreneur who received $100,000 from the billionaire's foundation. His biggest fundraiser, Jerrod MacFarlane, raised $1.6 million through undisclosed donors NYC Campaign Finance Board records—exactly the kind of dark money shell game he claims to oppose. Meanwhile, his campaign infrastructure operates through Soros-funded organizations like The Action Lab, which lists Soros’ Open Society Foundations as a key partner.

Even seasoned political observers recognize the performance. Matt Taibbi, the acclaimed investigative journalist who exposed everything from Wall Street corruption to the Twitter Files, noted that Mamdani is "as polished as they come in the conventional-political-skill department, able to adjust his style for any situation and never losing his cool before crowds or a camera." Born to "a postcolonial theorist and a future Hollywood director, he's a fancy prep school kid" who attended "Bank Street in Manhattan."

The revealing part isn't that Mamdani is solely funded by billionaires—he's not. It's that when faced with a choice between taking a righteous stand or playing the elite funding game, he chose the money while pretending to hold different values. Sure, it's not at Cuomo's scale, but he's still operating within the system he claims to oppose. While I'm certainly not a fan of Cuomo, at least he doesn't pretend to lead a Marxist revolution while cashing checks from Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and Soros-backed nonprofits.

While he now tells voters "I will not defund the police", in 2020 tweeting "We don't need an investigation to know that the NYPD is racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety. What we need is to #DefundTheNYPD."

Which version of Mamdani are New Yorkers actually getting?

As Naomi Wolf pointed out, if “‘Queer liberation means defund the police’?? Who do people call when there is antigay violence?”

The Foreign Policy Smokescreen

If the defund police issue reveals Mamdani's willingness to flip positions for political convenience, there's an even more charged topic that shows his tactical brilliance: Israel-Palestine.

No issue in American politics generates more heat, igniting passionate responses across the political spectrum with deeply held convictions that often transcend rational policy discussion. In New York City, with its large Jewish and Muslim populations, these tensions are particularly acute. I have my own complicated views on the Middle East—informed by my own upbringing and media diet that maybe I'll write about someday. But that's not what this piece is about.

The Israel-Palestine issue deserves particular attention here—not because of his specific positions on the conflict, but because of how brilliantly he's weaponized the entire debate. Even if his compassion for Palestinians is entirely earnest, he's turned a principled stance into perfect political theater. While other mayoral candidates reflexively promised to visit Israel as their first foreign trip, Mamdani refused—and from my perspective, he was absolutely right about this. Mayoral candidates of New York should be judged on what they'll do to help a decaying city, not their foreign policy positions. His compassion for innocent Palestinians may well be sincere, and his refusal to pander on Israel was politically calculated and/or courageous.

But here's where it becomes problematic: this principled stance has devolved into political theater. Identity politics is being weaponized both against him and by him. Many pro-Israel New Yorkers are screaming that he's antisemitic, while pro-Palestine activists celebrate him as their champion. Meanwhile, he uses racial categories to justify domestic policy. It's the same divisive playbook—just different teams playing the game.

The result? Everyone's arguing about Middle Eastern geopolitics while he quietly talks about seizing private property in Manhattan and targeting "whiter neighborhoods" for punitive taxation. Whether intentional or not, the foreign policy debate has become the perfect smokescreen for economic radicalism. I don't care that Mamdani is Muslim—I care about what his policies will do to New York City.

Understanding this dynamic is crucial: whether Mamdani is deliberately creating controversy or simply benefiting from it, the result is the same—voters focus on Middle East debates while his economic radicalism goes unexamined.

The Historical Amnesia

Mamdani's platform calls for moving "beyond the market" to "gradually buy up housing on the private market and convert it to community ownership" through community land trusts and social housing projects. He promises to "decommodify housing" and establish "a new era of social housing."

Here's what he either doesn't know or chooses to ignore: New York City has already tried this approach. In the 1980s, the city acquired over 100,000 housing units through tax foreclosure, becoming the nation's largest municipal landlord. As documented by the Cooper Hewitt, "By the middle of the 1980s the city possessed over 100,000 tax-foreclosed properties, making the government the largest landlord in New York City." The results were disastrous—buildings fell into disrepair, maintenance suffered, and crime flourished in affected areas, according to the Urban Institute.

As @amuse noted on X, "SOCIALISM: In the 80s NYC seized 100K housing units making the largest landlord in the US. They became symbols of urban decay: mismanaged, poorly maintained, and rife with crime. Zohran doesn't remember because he just became a citizen 7 years ago."

This is the fundamental problem with revolutionary politics: it's always promoted by people who have no memory of why we moved away from these systems in the first place. Mamdani is like someone who's never experienced winter advocating for outdoor camping in January.

The Feckless Opposition

Which brings us to an uncomfortable reality: Mamdani's opposition has been so pathetic that he actually seems reasonable by comparison. Andrew Cuomo—a morally bankrupt figure whose Covid policies caused immeasurable suffering and death—has never faced true scrutiny for lockdowns, forced drug protocols, and nursing home disasters. Don't even get me started on backing someone so fundamentally corrupt that even a desperate New York Times couldn't bring itself to endorse him. Cuomo represents everything wrong with the political swamp—corruption, incompetence, and zero accountability.

As Catherine Austin Fitts astutely observed: "Rather have an honest socialist than someone who had a significant hand at disappearing billions from HUD and engineering a mortgage bubble that cost the American taxpayers $27 trillion." At least with Mamdani, New Yorkers would know exactly what kind of economic destruction they're voting for.

Then there's Eric Adams, who ran on bringing New York's swagger back but has continued to ostracize over 20,000 unvaccinated workers who never got their jobs back. Adams didn't implement the mandates—de Blasio did—but he doubled down on them when all he had to do was make it right. Instead, he chose to participate in what may be the greatest human rights injustice in New York City that anyone alive can remember.

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might wonder whether Mamdani's opposition was designed to be so terrible that a socialist would seem like the reasonable choice. It feels so over the top, it does make anyone with a cynical mind wonder if the fix is in, and this is all part of a controlled demolition.

The Capitalist Confusion

Let me be clear about something: economic inequality in America is real and devastating. The system IS rigged - but not in the way Mamdani claims. We can't vote our way out of this problem because the people we elect are controlled by the same corporations perpetuating it. Both parties are bought and paid for by overlapping interests that benefit from keeping us divided while they extract wealth.

I am a capitalist and an entrepreneur. But I don't believe we currently have capitalism in America. What we have is socialism for the rich—bailouts, subsidies, and regulatory capture for corporations and the wealthy—combined with brutal market discipline for everyone else.

When people rail against "capitalism," they're usually angry about crony corporatism masquerading as free markets. Our Congress is bought and paid for by the same interests that fund both parties, keeping the masses fighting over cultural issues while the economic extraction continues.

The solution to crony capitalism isn't more government control—it's actual market accountability. Mamdani's proposals won't redistribute wealth from the actual elites; they'll redistribute it from middle-class homeowners to bureaucratic administrators while leaving the real power structure untouched. When was the last time you saw a government program run efficiently? When was the last time you waited in line at the DMV and thought, "I wish these people controlled the grocery stores too"?

As Taibbi observed about Mamdani's economic platform, the problem with socialism is that "the replacement for markets in socialism is not just human authority, but dumb authority. Yes, prices can be oppressive, but try swapping out organic pricing for committees of sociology majors and AOC types deciding how much they think shoes or ice cream or a house should cost." Mamdani's plan to "redirect funds from corporate supermarkets to city-owned grocery stores" assumes you can create "just the right amount of pain" to remove profit incentives without driving private competitors out of business entirely—a fantasy that ignores basic economic reality.

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

This brings me to the challenge I pose to Mamdani and his supporters—it's a sincere question that I'm asking and would be happy to be shown where I may be wrong: Can you name a single example of socialism or communism working at scale in a diverse, non-homogeneous country?

I should note: I was even a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, drawn to what seemed like populist appeal delivered with a message of unity rather than division. So I understand the attraction of these ideas—I've been there. While I was wrong about Bernie—he turned out to be a complete fraud—at least he was still operating within capitalist frameworks, pushing for higher taxes and more social programs, standard European-style social democracy.

Mamdani is advocating for something far more radical than Sanders ever dared: the actual seizure of private property. This isn't democratic socialism—this is Marx's communist revolution, just with modern packaging.

I can be honest about my own naivety: I used to believe healthcare was a right for everyone, complete with state-funded gym memberships and acupuncture. I thought a $30 minimum wage sounded great because workers should make more money. I dreamed of a world where good intentions automatically led to good outcomes.

Then came Covid. I learned that healthcare funded by the state could never mean you get to choose how you take care of yourself—it means you get whatever the corrupted institutions tell you is best for your body, typically pharmacological solutions that benefit their donors. I had a massive wake-up call to my own naivety about how these systems actually operate versus how they're sold to the public. And that $30 minimum wage? It just leads to more outsourcing and automation because businesses can't survive the cost structure, prices go up, and you end up with fewer jobs and more expensive everything.

These ideas resonate with people because most of us want a better world for everyone—but they never address who pays for these utopian promises or the devastating impact they have when implemented at scale. More fundamentally, these collectivist ideas never respect the individual or their choices. It's always top-down, one-size-fits-all solutions, which is especially problematic in healthcare where personal autonomy should be paramount.

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